Sarah Dickenson Snyder
Three Poems
After the Fracture
Things break forever, I used to think
before I found Kinsugi, the art of repair,
a mending that exposes the scars
in a map of gilded lines and curves,
a broken bowl becoming somehow more
than what it was before now webbed in gold.
A shattered country looks like debris
on a smooth shore, landing after damage.
There is the finding and puzzling together
with a hope that the quicksand
of pain does not have its way.
Sometimes piece by broken piece,
we seam our lives together, making
something stronger—a new vessel glinting.
Stone Work
I will come back to this world / in a white cotton dress. Kingdom after My Own Heart. / Kingdom of Fragile. Kingdom of Dwarves.
—Lucie Brock-Broido
Everyone walks through shadows. Even the Queen of Mirrors
inside Mirrors in her Queendom of Sisters and Daughters.
Queendom of Umbilical Cords. Queendom of Coffee Pots.
I find more—more stones, more bones, more dust and ash
to unpack carefully like the heirloom baptismal dress
wrapped in tissue paper or the last leaf falling, leaving
branch roots against the sky, the ground turned upside down.
I keep unfolding, unmolding what aches to be retold.
The stone stacks I build and unbuild. The Queendom
of Cairns. Queendom of Water Marks.
So much compressed into a stone, the many stones
I’ve stolen, pieces of a place to remember being there.
I’d like to slice them like cake see the carbon of stars,
taste their light, the pumiced remains of eruptions,
the leathery skin of dinosaurs, the moonlight pressed into sea,
that first bite of an apple, that flesh and the stenciled fear
on cave walls, the making and unmaking of ruins
when the world was snow-filled then ice-covered, not even
one window of sadness left. Queendom of Unblemished.
I might find what I wanted all those hidden tears ago—
maybe the unfracture, a return to the ease of beginnings
before the shatter in the Queendom of Adjusting Well.
Queendom of Undressing. When my skin felt like a suit
with nothing underneath but a weightless kitten or the angel weight
of sorrow or nothing, nothing at all in the Queendom of No Corners.
Queendom of Pins Pursed in the Lips. Queendom of Sheets Drying
in Wind peopled by women who rinse rice, hold keys in their fists
in the dark, know about old failures and twisting rivers,
about opening gates and making gardens by lifting rocks.
Look, right there—the silhouette of one crow
in the center of the road plucking at fresh death
as the last dash of sun gives even pebbles spikes of shadows
in the Queendom of Gravity and Orbit. I harness the work
of stones, fossick for evidence and remembrance,
unearth new moons. Queendom of Repair.
Letterpressing in Autumn, 2020
after Ada Limón
I set each sort upside down in the composing stick,
“A Name” emerging like the steady march of ice across our pond,
a dark openness lightening. In the wooden drawer
below I find the italicized letters for Eve’s
whispered words: Name me. Name me.
And now I welcome the unnamed, a billowing
or a deep murmuration as if the steeled depth of me
had been replaced or loosened back into itself.
It was like a single frond of a fern catching wind,
that kind of breathing freely, like what had tightened
released, first tears, then ease.
It was the fullness of a red maple,
the one on Jericho Street that makes an apron
of redness on the grass below when the sun
weaves through its generous leaves,
a world unwobbling and settling,
and from my window
I see a group of people on the crest of the ridge coming toward me.
I hear joy in their voices and in the late afternoon light,
that perfect slant of our star that rescues almost everything.
I see their faces now.
—Submitted on 12/17/2020
Sarah Dickenson Snyder is the author of The Human Contract ( Kelsay Books, 2017), Notes from a Nomad (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and With a Polaroid Camera (Main Street Rag. 2019). Her poems have appeared in Rattle, The Sewanee Review, RHINO, and other journals. Online at sarahdickensonsnyder.com.
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